$20k/m Finding Clients on LinkedIn

if you've been hanging around the design Internet community lately you might have heard that LinkedIn is super super strong right now and people are doing crazy stuff and finding tons of clients on LinkedIn now on today's video I'm talking to Josh who is a very impressive 18 year old who's found a way to consistently found find great clients on LinkedIn and he's gonna tell us how he's been doing it so this is gonna be very very cool and interesting conversation why I want to listen to that personally I don't have much experience with LinkedIn which is why I'm so fascinated about it so I will be creating more content on LinkedIn on the channel soon so if you're not subscribed yet might be a good chance to subscribe right now cuz more awesome LinkedIn and finding clients content is coming to this channel let's hey Josh how are you thank you so much for coming on the show and talking to me I'll give a little bit of context to our call today so we Josh's a student in one of my courses and he posted a message on Facebook that he had major successes in finding clients through LinkedIn and since I didn't I don't have personally a lot of experience with LinkedIn I was super intrigued specifically when he mentioned very impressive numbers so Josh let's start by you you know sharing who are you've shared with me and then we'll dissect dive deep into your story she's super impressive and understand how you did this yeah so over the past several months well for the past several years I've ran a marketing agency where I was doing branding and marketing and web design and during the summer I realized that there is definitely a need to automate more processes and make more out of my business so in the time I decided to niche down my agency and try to automate the leads coming in so I wouldn't have to spend time worrying about clients I could just service the client work and over this time I I eventually kind of came across LinkedIn and I started running a LinkedIn outbound prospecting campaign and since then we only started running it about a month and a half ago and I've already landed multiple clients through it all ten times what I used to charge okay so this share the numbers I think the numbers yeah yeah sure yeah I understand so in the summer I was selling websites for anywhere between 400 to $1500 and the first website I closed through LinkedIn was for $4,000 and then after that there was another $5,000 project and hopefully I'll actually be able to by next week close a ten thousand dollar project nice nice great success and you're only 18 okay now that's that's that's incredible so I want to understand I mean it sounds like a dream of every creative person you know just hey I want to focus on the design I want to focus on service in the client I don't want to deal with all these leads and stuff like that and when you hear the words automation and stuff like that it sounds really intriguing so can you share a little bit about what it is how does that work like for me a complete newbie on LinkedIn teach me the stuff yeah so the important part isn't even necessarily the LinkedIn itself it's just having a very specific sales message so when I'm on LinkedIn it is very important that I know exactly who I'm serving what their problem is and how I'm solving it I can't just be a web design agency messaging people saying hey I build websites and our websites are really good our founding is extremely targeted so we hire another agency to do this for us but overseeing it will target a client can you explain what you mean by out bounding is this reaching out people cold or yeah so outbound prospecting to me is essentially you qualify and find a lead that is relevant and then you start sending them messages or call them etc so for us there's a back-end kind of machine that is finding look-alikes to people in the SAS industry and people that basically can't explain before we dive deep can you explain what your niche is how you came yeah how did you came to choose it and how do you know what the right messaging is to reach out to those people yeah so in the summer I had no idea what my niche was going to be but what I did understand was the my main current problem was business owners didn't understand the value of the web sites I was building them so the quickest way to combat this for me was to service an industry where if I made a 10% difference in their website it would affect their bottom line 10% because their revenues actually going through their website and that was huge for me so I decided I would go into the sash slash b2b niche got it sauce is software as a service for the people outside maybe that the tech realm but I think this is really smart because the the general premise around value pricing is as you said oh if I can improve your website 10% and you're making a million dollar 10% is $100,000 it makes sense to invest you know but most most designers don't work with clients maybe that it's very specific where it's easy to to understand them so it's really smart to you know to choose the SAS niche okay so now that you understand that how did you pick the right message was the right message will improve convergence 10% yeah so this was a recommendation to me and it was to come up with a proprietary formula so what this proprietary formula is is as I tried to come up with a metric that makes perfect sense for SAS companies so the obvious one to go to was m RR so we have the revering yeah so monthly recurring revenue so we have a proprietary mr our formula and what this mr our formula is is its market segmentation result driven messaging and reinforced for conversion a lot's my sounds very impressive who gave you the advice to do that to come up with something proprietary this was actually the LinkedIn guy he told me that yeah so I've had my linkedin coach he's been coaching me along this whole time making sure that all my efforts are being optimized and he said when you have a proprietary system people are very interested in understanding how it works and the important part is that you have a process it's not like you're working with somebody and it's essentially to take the risk out of the situation they know you have a process this is an hour mr our growth formula obviously they want to tap into that okay question which I'm sure a lot of the people in the comments are going to say when you started out did you already have proof that this work that you have already had kind of portfolio or you just said okay I'm gonna go into the SAS niche how do you how do you get started and finding the first one so this was something I had to think about for a while because I wanted to make sure when I went into these calls I wasn't screwing it up and what I did was essentially I would say we have provided great results for our clients in the past we have helped our clients achieve a variety of different results in different industries and I'd be happy to show you what we've done for them and we can and how we can apply similar concepts to your business so you just said something general without giving specific so I would actually give them website so I have built websites in the past just not with my Emer our formula and not with SAS companies so I can say look here's this agency that we built a website for and they're looking to increase their discovery call sign up rate look at this website there's these beautiful interactions etc we can create something even better for you and in a lot of in a lot of scenarios they didn't even really ask for portfolio some people did but a lot of people did it not really interesting okay so that's it's really interesting I'm going I know I'm going in a lot of different direction but we'll get back to the story but I'm really curious because you know you are 18 you you're in might one of my courses but you now you've also mentioned that you have a LinkedIn code which is something really interesting how did you make that decision to start working with the LinkedIn coach why would you think it's something that could work for you or worth investing yeah so I decided there was essentially nothing more important to me than automating out certain parts of my business so I'd been running and doing web design for multiple years and it what it felt like it was so insanely impossible to scale my business it felt like I was working harder than anybody else I was coming up with better ideas than anybody else and I was making less than everybody else and the reason I think so many designers feel that way yeah and I and I think the reason was is because I had too many things to do I couldn't do anything at an extremely high level because I had to do everything so I decided if I was able to reduce all the time of me thinking about having to land clients and I knew I could just focus on the product and delivering the best result if my LinkedIn guy if he was able to bring me one client a month that's $10,000 a month and that's I'm okay with that that that would seem like a successful investment to me yeah so yeah exactly so I put a ton of time okay but it's I want to dive deeper into yeah first of all I like your how you're thinking about stuff and investing it's very smart I think however I do think you know there's a lot of people around the internet running around saying Oh Facebook Ads is the thing for you LinkedIn is the thing for you grow your Instagram is the thing for you so there's a lot of offers you know I I'm interested in why you decided on LinkedIn so with Facebook paid ads so I previously had a partner in my business he is actually running Facebook paid ads for his social media marketing agency every day his schedule is completely booked with calls but the reason why I didn't take that route initially I plan on running Facebook ads but I didn't because I don't have enough case studies I realized because Facebook is significantly more automated they'll be being sent to a video sales letter where I'm explaining more about what I do it's really important that I've got good case studies and that the case studies really are Wow case studies but with LinkedIn because there's more face-to-face it's more conversational they don't even realize that this whole system is automated it's much easier to sell people than when it's automated through Facebook without those case studies okay so you've LinkedIn you feel is a little bit more high touch and may be a good place to get started on yeah for sure because I think you can have good convert in the same way it's kind of like networking in the sense when you show up to networking in person which is how I used to generate all of my business you're able to develop relationships with people and that trust is built through things other than your case study dude you're 18 when when are you going to networking events and usually get me I mean it's super impressive yeah I started going to networking events when I was 15 so I would always be the youngest guy in the room by 30 years it's incredible what would you do when you go to these events yeah so I would just go to relevant digital marketing events and essentially I would just I walk in with all of my anxiety built up inside I'd me not knowing what to say and I just kind of start throwing myself in circles and asking who people were and what they did and what brought them there and eventually that work enough times that I had a business nice nice very impressive okay so let's get back into the LinkedIn so your first step was to start working with a LinkedIn coach who kind of directed you help you craft the right message and find your niche what was the next step you you talked about automation do you went right ahead for trying to automate the process or did you do it manually at some point so first thing so first thing I dealt with was we I had my coach I talked to him we developed our strategy we understood what we kind of needed going forward and we went straight into the messaging so the messaging was really important so the way it starts off is we'll start off in the sequence with hey great to connect just looking to grow our network and then the second message is thanks for connect like really happy we connected I just wanted to personally introduce myself and this is the day after so in this point I'll say I'm Josh and I helped SAS companies increase their MRR etc and then after that seven days later if they don't answer hey I never heard back are you looking to do this this that and that's the sequence and that is being automate so the process is there's some kind of an algorithm that look is looking for the right fit which is for you SAS companies is it after a certain stage like after they raised a bunch of money or me so the only thing I don't have too much information on is the exact targeting but what I'm very familiar with is in sales and navigators there's tons of CRMs where you can go in and just as long as you've determined who your kind of target audiences you you can really just start sending out these messages daily automated to your ideal client so so is this an automated software or people who are doing this for you you say you work with an agent so it's a metric both so it's a mix of both the part that is automated is the connection requests being sent so that's how the whole initiation happens it's a connection request with a message and then the wear person comes in is I don't book any of the meetings so when a person responds typically you would have to talk to him want to get on this 15 minute discovery call how do these times work my guy he handles all of that so I don't have to deal with any you see we have a person doing that but live really a lot oh yeah actually goes in and invokes the appointments come on down you go on the appointments right yeah only thing I have to do is look at my calendar in the morning and see if I've got any appointments and then show up to them God and you have no context or he puts some context about the companies and something they in the midst of trying to MIT so when because I don't have a case study I can't push as hard on them before I'm on the actual call so for example I'd like to ask more prospecting questions prior to my discovery call but I don't want to overwhelm them or scare them or lower the amount of calls coming through without that case I do without people fully understanding what I do going into the call because a lot of people going into the caller just like oh what's your mr formula oh I'd like to learn more about this and having a little if they were more intent based that would definitely improve the results of my searches right now got it so it's basically is this a company that offers this is a service like hey look we're gonna you know automate or send messages to or manage or LinkedIn the amps and you're gonna get X amount of calls per month yeah I just I just pay them on a monthly retainer yeah yeah I pay them on a monthly retainer and they just send me the traffic every month I I know so how many calls are you doing four per week per month um I probably had I would say in the first month at Lee onee calls I would say I probably had about twenty Sol's per month yeah per month yeah Wow it's like homeless one every day yeah yeah and I think that I could scale that up and improve that number if I improved my messaging and refine my messaging a little bit bit because this is also this is without any refining either this is just me going in and pushing it and this is what came of it I still have to do a whole round of refining and really improve and maximize this machine it's really really interesting I remember about a year ago I think when I was still debating if to scale my freelance business or know a company can't reached out to me with basically this offer and I was really intrigued by it I ended up not doing this but I'm so happy to hear from you that it works because essentially it's like you said I'm outsourcing the the kind of the lead acquisition for my business and you know I have leads automatically coming in on a sustainable or you know predictable base the question is do you think you'll be able to scale this or maintain this long-term what do you think yeah a hundred percent so I a hundred percent believe that with my current resources I can scale this to fifty thousand dollars a month oh wow it's incredible yeah because the way everything's set up is if I can land five clients a month through whether that be through Facebook advertising LinkedIn whatever I only spend less than 10 hours a project between strategy and project management so all the other work is being outsourced anyways oh so you don't do the design yourself you outsource the design and development you do the strategy and the basically the management of the project yeah so although so I've gained through the web flow master class although I know how to build web flow websites and I do internally I know where my strengths are and I know that there's better designers in the world than me so I just want to max out my time and where I can profit the most from my time yeah that's great so so you were you have been in the web flow master class or the $10,000 website process you've been over both yeah and have you found like what was that so you said web flow is cool but you're not gonna end up building the website yourself how about the the process for the web design has that been so yeah the way that you work oh for sure so the 10k web design process this fell into my hands in the summer so this was when I saw this this was kind of my realizing of I'm not charging enough for my websites I need to find I know that I'm able to provide value I know I understand branding pretty well I need to be able to pull everything in and hone in what people really care about and what people are really spending lots of money on because for the for the longest time when I first got into this whole web design industry I was always looking oh how much are other people charging and I'm looking at myself like okay five hundred thousand dollars and then I look on these websites and they'd say agencies typically charge from like ten to a hundred thousand dollars and I'm like what how was this possible so I was like I wanted to really break down why people spend so much money on web sites and where that value is and I think the 10k web design process really helped lay that out for me nice I'm happy to hear and by the way you say you're based in Canada right yeah Toronto are you are in Toronto what are you at City are you freezing right now yeah are you underground so are you only working with local customers in Canada or in Toronto how are you or it doesn't matter because you work not so not a single one of the clients I've closed through LinkedIn have been local they've all actually been in the States which has coincidentally also raised my prices another 30% because of the conversion rate but yeah so all completely remote yeah there's maybe a couple clients I have in person but how do you find managing the process specifically doing strategy remotely um I think I think it's important as long as the process is very concrete and that there's an like the way I used to build websites where it's like oh I go I'd gather all the content and then we kind of talk about strategy a little bit and then kind of start diving into it and go back and forth that would be a little bit messy remote but because everything I do is in phases I know exactly what's being done and when we've got this meeting after one week of research we've got this discovery call meeting we've got this strategy session it's pretty manageable all right I want to go back into LinkedIn and I think you're really smart young men and really thoughtful about how you build your business so my question is are you not afraid that you kind of outsource maybe actually a core a core part of your business which is how you find clients I mean let's say this agency or that like the people who help you right now they go away are you gonna be stuck without a business right now yeah so I think when I first started in web design the goal was always to be able to do slightly higher level tasks where I wasn't spending all all day building websites but I understood that for me to be the best at what I do and be able to understand the inner workings of everything I needed to be able to do it myself so I've learned everything to a degree but essentially I can create anything I just can't do very efficiently like it might take me three hours to figure out an interaction but I can figure it out so when I'm working with a designer I'm not putting a hundred percent of my trust in them because if they mess up first off there's a of trust because we go through wireframes before we go into the web flow build which is a really big portion of not messing that up and then secondly because I know how to use web flow I'm selling to the client essentially a trust of a trust seal so they know because they're working with me that they're gonna get the best service so regardless of who builds the website I just have to approve it and make sure that everything is good before it gets to them yeah but I want to go back specifically back to the to the let's say client acquisition strategy that you have there yeah um are you not afraid now we're gonna be talking about this and like I guess I hope some people's brains are gonna explode like minded when I heard about it like dude I got to do that myself now if everybody's you know understand how this goes if everybody understand hey let's target like sauce companies startup companies that are making a lot of money let's pitch them on LinkedIn isn't that going to create noise or you know make your life harder I mean is it not going to be very crowded on LinkedIn very very fast I think that there is a possibility of that happening I think that I've I've had calls with people who have said oh we've had five people call us already or something like that the the thing is is there's already a million web design agencies so what's the difference between my SAS business in their web design agency and the purpose is being able to come at an angle that you're actually providing a better solution than other people so if everybody gets on and everybody's doing SAS and maybe you have to do put more emphasis into content marketing to position yourself in a way that people view you differently than the average person coming in or understand the kind of negative things that would come along with the industry becoming more saturated and how to talk to the client in a way that reassures them that there's going to be no problem in working with you obviously there's good service providers service providers etc awesome alright Josh I want to wrap up the the call so I I just can you give I mean I know so many people in the audience are just starting out and maybe they're not your age but they're at the position probably where have you been maybe just in the summer where they're doing projects for not enough money what is what is the kind of great insight or tip that you can give them that will help them make the leap that you have did done no exactly what you are solving for the business and it's by far the most important whether that be you niche nation down or whatever just understanding exactly what your service does for the end-user because if you understand exactly what your selling point and that it's a no-brainer to work with you it doesn't matter if it's five ten thousand dollars if they're a business that's doing at least several hundred thousand dollars this is extremely extremely important to them and it can cause like the biggest problem in their business if they don't fix it and if you don't understand what that problem is that you're fixing and how you're solving it then you're you're gonna have a very tough time selling yourself is is there something that helped you understand better what are you what is your selling point some resource or something that helped you focus I think the the biggest thing was niching down understanding that I'm helping SAS clients and then just if you've gone through the 10k web design course you understand the different kind of key performance indicators that different clients could have and just understanding how to reach them within that niche awesome all right Josh Congrats on your success so far it's really really impressive and and thank you for sharing all that super useful information there are no problem all right good luck in the upcoming year thank you so much [Music]

Channel: Flux Academy

Views: 110,828

Keywords: Design, designer, ran segall, flux, startups, startup, freelance designer, web design, web designer, web development, web developer, web development freelancer, web development tools, freelance web developer, web flow, how to start freelancing, web design business, how to freelance, start freelancing, freelance web design, Freelance, freelancer, freelancing, graphic design, graphic designer, web designer career, web design tutorial, website design

Id: ZNpPAsVTPrk

Length: 28min 59sec (1739 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 29 2020